VOX POPS: Crowdsourcing Museum Definition perspectives for Museopunks

As you probably know, the International Council of Museums recently proposed a new definition for museums. Although the vote on the definition was postponed, the conversations that it sparked have been valuable and provocative. On the next episode of Museopunks, we wanted to try to unpack more nuance and perspectives than we can do with any single interview, so we’re crowdsourcing some responses to the following prompts or questions.

Do we need a new international definition of museums?
How might a new definition affect the sector and/or your work within it?
Is this discussion important within your national setting?
Has the conversation changed anything for you, or is this discussion a distraction?
Was this the right definition?
What is a museum? What is your vision for museums?
What else should we be thinking about in this conversation?

If you want to contribute, please send me a short (1min-5min) audio recording of your perspectives. In your recording, please identify yourself as you’d like to be represented on the show, as well as noting your country and if you’re an ICOM member.

We’re doing this as a bit of a sprint, so it would be amazing if you could send me your reply by Sunday this week (October 6).

We’ll be selecting a number of responses to go on the episode, but may also release an additional track online featuring other responses if we receive too many to feature on the show. We’d love to hear from people in different parts of the world too, so if you’re somewhere that we don’t always feature via our guests, get in touch!

a new punk.

A couple of weeks ago, I put out a call for a collaborator, co-host and co-producer for Museopunks, the podcast for the progressive museum. I was overwhelmed by how many people reached out to find out more and put themselves forward. I had in-person or phone calls with nine potential collaborators, who ranged from people I knew very well to strangers with impressive or intriguing backgrounds within the sector.

Through those discussions, a few things became clear:

Museopunks has become more than a podcast for me. It is how my professional identity expresses itself. It is my professional practice. The potential collaborators who stood out where the ones who understood that innately.
Museopunks is vehicle for discussing boundary-pushing work in museums with an intersectional approach and nuanced focus. But because Museopunks tackles wide-ranging topics, the best collaborator was not necessarily someone with deep knowledge around a single aspect of progressive museum practice, but broad curiosity about museums, their place in the world, and their institutional practices.
Since my collaborator will help shape the show, I wanted someone who was aware of the important issues in the sector and who has vision for ways that we can approach them in a “museopunks” way. I had one conversation with a potential collaborator who had great vision, but whose approach to storytelling was so different from my own that it felt like we were talking about a different show. Although collaboration will change the show by necessity, it was critical that my collaborator shared my vision of the work itself.

I’m thrilled to announce that I have, indeed, found a new Punk to join the show: Ed Rodley, Director of Integrated Media at the Peabody Essex Museum. Ed and I have worked together on a number of project over the years, including CODE|WORDS, Humanizing the Digital and the MCN2015 Conference. He is one of the smartest museum thinkers I know, and I never stop learning from him. As a bonus, we just finished working on a Museopunks episode together (recorded before I started looking for a collaborator, but probably part of the inspiration for doing so).

Although I’ve (perhaps unsurprisingly) ended up with a collaborator whom I know well, and have worked with for years, this process was a wonderful, generative one and has encouraged me to think more creatively about other ways that Museopunks might be able to explore other forms of collaboration, such as having regular guests and correspondents-from-the-field. While I do not know exactly what form that will take, the next few months will include some behind-the-scenes discussion, exploration and experimentation, as we look at the longer term impact of these discussions. I hope that many of the people I connected with in the last few weeks may be part of the future of the show.

Thank you to everyone who reached out, or who forwarded my post to friends and colleagues with recommendations for connection. It was wonderful to get better acquainted with listeners, colleagues from the sector, and potential collaborators. We have a sector filled with brilliant people, y’all.

And Ed… welcome to the show!

Looking for a collaborator on Museopunks

If you’re reading this, you probably know that I host and produce a podcast called Museopunks, the podcast for the progressive museum. For the first couple of years of its life, Museopunks was a collaboration between myself and Jeffrey Inscho. It was one of the best collaborations I’ve ever worked on.

Jeffrey left the museum sector in early 2018, and since that time I’ve been trying to keep museopunks going on my own, but it’s been tough. I lack the technical chops to make great audio, and it’s harder doing the conceptual work around episodes without someone to bounce ideas off. The podcast, while relatively easy with two people, has been harder to produce by myself, and I’ve struggled to maintain a regular production schedule. So, I am officially starting the search for Museopunks’ second co-producer.

What I’m looking for: a collaborator, co-host and co-producer who is motivated by changing museums for the better – making them more welcoming, more diverse and equitable, better prepared to think about and deal with the implications of digital technologies. The podcast started in 2013 with a focus on tech, but my sense of what progressive practice in museums looks like today has grown considerably. You can get a sense of the kinds of topics I’ve been covering here.

Tech/audio production skills would be great but not necessary. What is essential is curiosity, open-mindedness, good listening skills and thoughtfulness about museum practice. For me, being a good host means making space for other voices and perspectives to shine.

The podcast is sponsored by the American Alliance of Museums, and they are super supportive of the work that we’ve been doing. Although there is a small annual honorarium, this is more a “love and glory” kind of project. That said, it’s been one of the most rewarding projects I’ve worked on and has offered so many opportunities and expanded my understanding about museums several fold.

At this stage, I’m putting feelers out for anyone who might be interested in a discussion about a collaboration. If this is you, or you know someone I should be talking to about this, please let me know or get in touch via Twitter.

BTW – This is pretty scary, because Museopunks is intimately important to me, but I want it to have the opportunity to be the best it can be going forward, so it’s time to let go a little bit and open to new possibilities.

A newsy post: On coming to America and projects new and old.

Today has been my last Wednesday in Australia in the foreseeable future. On Sunday, I pack up my life and move to Baltimore, MD, to join Nancy Proctor as the Digital Content Manager at the Baltimore Museum of Art. I am on the cusp of some of the greatest change in my life, and I could not be more excited about the opportunity to explore a new city, a new country, a new museum, a new collection, and a new job. It is a moment I have dreamed of, and I cannot wait to get my teeth stuck into the challenges and adventures – particularly with the Museum itself going through some hugely interesting changes at present. A century old this year, it is undergoing a $28 million renovation, and is rethinking how visitors experience the BMA’s world-class collection, which makes this a brilliant time to leap across an ocean and join the Museum.

What makes the opportunity even better is its timing, which comes just as I’m putting the finishing touches on my dissertation – to be handed in within weeks. This means that my arrival in B’More will coincide with renewed opportunity for exploration, rather than introspection. I can move out of the all-consuming period of writing that has marked the last several months, and into a more exploratory, questioning, learning phase again.

This bodes well for blogging, since museum geek is, for me, a space for exactly those things. It has never been about complete ideas, but rather for examining tensions and unknowns. This is perhaps one reason writing became so hard when the focus of my work was on pulling ideas into a finished shape; into closing off avenues rather than opening them up…

It also bodes well for side projects, and I am so excited about a couple of the ones that I’ve had simmering away for several months. Probably the two most exciting are CODE | WORDS: Technology and theory in the museum – An experiment in online publishing and discourse and Museopunks, the podcast that Jeffrey Inscho and I create together.

If you haven’t yet heard of it, CODE | WORDS is an experimental discursive publishing project that gathers a diverse group of leading thinkers and practitioners to explore emerging issues concerning the nature of museums in light of the dramatic and ongoing impact of digital technologies on society. It’s something that Ed Rodley, Rob Stein and I have been working on for a little while (see Ed’s posts here and here), but with the publication of Michael Edson’s beautiful, provocative opening essay, it has finally become real. You should go and read what he has written. It is sinply wonderful.

What excites me most about CODE | WORDS is that we’re hoping that folk who might not normally blog or write about museums regularly, but who still think about them and want to try out or make public some thoughts on the subject, will contribute to the discussion – bringing new perspectives, new thinkers, new voices. If you think that might be you, feel free to drop me a line and I’m happy to help run through any ideas you have.

The other project that I continue to be excited about is Museopunks, which Jeff and I have been running for just over a year now. Every episode continues to help me learn something new, and from the feedback we’ve been getting, that goes for listeners too. If you haven’t checked into the show for a while, then I recommend you listen to the current episode, which is with Titus Bicknell on the complex and hugely important issue of net neutrality. This is a big one that could impact museums all over the world in the delivery of online content. While you’re thinking about the topic, check into the Museums and the Web discussion on the subject too.

In April, Museopunks was honoured to receive a Best of the Web Award in the category of Museum Professional at Museums and the Web. It meant a lot to us to receive this recognition, and it was great inspiration to continue to delve into the types of questions that have driven our work over this past year. But of course, Museopunks is nothing without the community that supports it, including guests on the show, listeners, and those who get in contact with ideas, thoughts, and feedback. So, thank you to all of you! It is a rare and wonderful gift to be able to have such discussions in a context that allows us to share them more broadly with the profession and the world.

All right! That’s enough of a round-up of the big things happening in my (professional) world. Next time I drop into the blog, it will probably be from my new home in the USA. Very cool. Then I get to start working out what it means to blog from inside an institution, rather than outside… and that, my friends, could be a whole new type of exploration…

Catch you on the flipside!

PS – Sydney, I’m going to be having a few farewell drinks on Saturday 24 May at the Arthouse Hotel, from 8pm. It’ll be my last unofficial #drinkingaboutmuseums in Australia for a while, so you should come and join me if you can.

Museopunks episode 3 – The Shape of Punk to Come – is online

This year, I’ve been super lucky to embark on a few different collaborative projects. One of the major ones was the paper that Danny Birchall and I co-wrote for MW2013, which kicked off a whole new line of investigation for me in research, and the other is the museopunks podcast that Jeffrey Inscho and I launched in April.

Both projects have been super rewarding, and I think it’s because they’ve eached pulled me out of my own headspace and the set of assumptions I port around, and forced me to push my work in new directions. Danny summed up similar feelings when he wrote about the experience of collaboration earlier this year:

When you’re working with someone towards a definition of a shared project, there are many modes in which you can operate. Sometimes you try to write down what you think they’re already thinking (and sometimes fail); sometimes you get to try your ideas out before they’re fully formed; you can take it in turns to lead the process. Most importantly, your paper or presentation goes beyond just trying to fill your audience’s cup with the knowledge you have, and moves towards making and thinking new things.

With that in mind, I’m super pleased to announce that the third episode of museopunks is online. In this episode, Jeffrey and I chatted to Bridget McKenzie from Flow Associates about future scanning and museums. It was a subject I was super keen to dig into a little further after being part of a session on Shaping the Future of Museums at Museums Australia 2013, and when I noticed all the Tweets from Bridget’s talk on a similar subject at MuseumNext, I knew we had to talk about the shape of ~~punk~~ museums to come.

This episode is actually the first of two with a focus on museum futures. Next month, we’ll be talking to Elizabeth Merritt from the Center of the Future of Museums, so if you have any particular questions you’re keen for us to investigate, feel free to send them through.

In the meantime, you can subscribe to Museopunks via iTunes, or check out our first two episodes. In Episode 1, we spoke to Michael Edson and Paul Rowe about museums in the Age of Scale, and Episode 2 focussed on museums, design and design thinking, with Dana Mitroff Silvers and Scott Gillam. If you have any ideas for topics you think we should dig into, or potential guests you’d love to hear from in future, please drop me or Jeffrey a line. We’re always eager to have our own ideas pushed a little further too.

Announcing Museopunks – a new podcasting project

One of the themes that emerged in day one of Museums and the Web was a question of how museums can work at web scale; how their practice has to shift in order to curate the digital world or to deal with the rare becoming commonplace. It’s a super interesting question, and one that I’ve been lucky enough to delve into a little deeper in recent weeks in some conversations with Mike Edson (Director of Web and New Media Strategy at the Smithsonian Institution) and Paul Rowe (CEO of Vernon Systems).

The cool thing is that these conversations were actually recorded as the very first episode of a new podcasting project that Jeffrey Inscho (Web and Digital Media Manager, Carnegie Museum of Art) and I are kicking off, launching today.

Museopunks is a podcast for the progressive museum. Each month, we’ll invite passionate practitioners to tackle prominent issues and big ideas facing museums in the modern age. With innovation, experimentation and creativity as focus points, Museopunks features forward-thinking people and projects that push the sector into new territories.

In the inaugural episode of the Museopunks podcast, we chat to Mike and Paul about museums in the Age of Scale. How can museums rethink their practices to work at web scale, from the smallest institutions up to the biggest?

This is a project that Jeffrey and I are super excited about. We’re both keen to hear from different voices and get into subjects that maybe deserve a little more focussed investigation. So we’d love to hear what you think about the podcast, or ideas for future shows or guests that we should dig into. It would also be great if you wanted to get involved with the discussion about scale that we’ll have over at the Museopunks website. How do you think museums should tackle the complexities – and opportunities – that come from trying to scale up digital (and even non-digital) operations?

You can subscribe to Museopunks via iTunes.